Mounts look a little silly right now, and some champions can't even use them. It's a nice monetization idea on the surface, but is limited to bipedal characters. Not to mention the weirdness of clashing art styles between colorful Warcraft mounts and Starcraft/Diablo's gritty darkness.

I am really digging their game design, though. At least in theory, since I haven't played. They've focused gameplay toward pushing with mechanics like Tower ammo causing them to exhaust, merc camps joining a lane push when defeated, and team experience replacing last-hit gold. Tower ammo and those walls take away from the nuances of ganking, though, but the smaller map sizes and simplified gameplay direction make it understandable.

What I like most is the merger of items and skill points into the multiple-choice talent system, which we've seen in WoW's big talent update and the game Bastion before that. For the designers, a talent system gives per-champion balancing controls over items which have indiscriminate cascading effects on all champions. For players, it ensures there is no outright 'wrong' choice, and confines your choices to a tidy few each level rather than 100+ good, great, and terrible choices when you port back to base.

Hercanic wrote:Mounts look a little silly right now, and some champions can't even use them. It's a nice monetization idea on the surface, but is limited to bipedal characters. Not to mention the weirdness of clashing art styles between colorful Warcraft mounts and Starcraft/Diablo's gritty darkness.

I am really digging their game design, though. At least in theory, since I haven't played. They've focused gameplay toward pushing with mechanics like Tower ammo causing them to exhaust, merc camps joining a lane push when defeated, and team experience replacing last-hit gold. Tower ammo and those walls take away from the nuances of ganking, though, but the smaller map sizes and simplified gameplay direction make it understandable.

What I like most is the merger of items and skill points into the multiple-choice talent system, which we've seen in WoW's big talent update and the game Bastion before that. For the designers, a talent system gives per-champion balancing controls over items which have indiscriminate cascading effects on all champions. For players, it ensures there is no outright 'wrong' choice, and confines your choices to a tidy few each level rather than 100+ good, great, and terrible choices when you port back to base.

So it's basically WoW's talent tree? Because Blizzard has shown repeatedly that they can't balance talents and there always is a certain spec that is vastly superior to every other possible combination. It also seems that this design choice is going to pretty much push the game to a state of only 10 heroes being used. Dota had weaker heroes, but you saw a lot of variety due to item and hero combinations changing based on mathups. At a higher level I also see this being blizzard basically enforcing a metagame instead of players shaping it (hello resto druid/ms war 2s).

It's to my fortune that Uther is in the Free Hero rotation this week as he was the Hero in the current set that I was most interested in using. Unfortunately it also means I have to play a ton more games before I can unlock the guy permanently with gold; he's not cheap. Of course being a healer everybody and their mother comes running after you; I've only had serious problems when I get caught by myself.

I tried out Abathur (he's also in this week's rotation) and he's really... well, kind of hard to use. One of the big problems with using him is you're effectively down a Hero on your team while he's zooming around augmenting other Heroes.

Other than that, though... I'm still not entirely happy with what Heroes are available at the moment. Part of that is knowing that Anub'arak is coming and he's not playable yet.

@wibodI haven't paid attention to the game at all, other than what I have been told off hand, but to me it seems Blizzard never really intended to make a competitive game. They know they can't, so they're effectively trying to milk the casual audience from another teet, with Hearthstone playing that exact role in the card game sector. They know they can't make MTG or Pokemon, so they'll make something people who can't play MTG or Pokemon can play. Something that requires virtually no real effort to play, cannot be played wrong (exactly as herc described), and is mostly reliant on RNG or stats as opposed to skill (WoW, d3, sc2). (/e Also, I'd wager the whole ammo thing is just to reduce game time, since league games can average 30 minutes+ and that is generally too long for casuals to pay attention to.)

I mean, I have a hard enough time taking LoL or dota 2 seriously when both games are heavily anti-skill in many ways, I'd have a much harder time taking this one seriously. But, I guess when you can't lawsuit your way into the Moba market, you may as well try to wedge your way in another way.

I think the most interesting part that will come out of this is how dota 2/league will respond to their casual sector getting attacked. Because that's still the biggest contributor to their respective userbases.

I've had the alpha for awhile... as someone with a pretty deep dota/dota2 background it wasn't very impressive and I got bored of the game quick. I hope they add some more complexity to it, I love the Blizzard universe but the game just can't keep me entertained. Keys of Sealing was better IMO!

As someone with a DotA/LoL non-DotA 2 background, I find DotA 2 extremely boring... But enjoy Heroes. It's not a MOBA similar to those we've all been used to playing, and that's what I've enjoyed about it so far. I still enjoy League if I want something more.. "sporty" I guess would be the word, but for lighter and more entertaining gameplay, I go with Heroes for the time being.

I agree with that, actually. I'm sick of all these games that try to be a carbon copy of the original DotA with no attempt to add anything new or interesting. They act as if the original game's mechanics are sacred even though half of it was because of a buggy and archaic game engine.

I have to say one of the things I *really* hate about league (not sure if it's a problem in dota) is the insane CC/mobility creep the game has going on. Most of the non-adc champions have some kind of gap closer and/or hard CC, and since team fights end in like 2-3 seconds, it's really not uncommon to just be stunned for the entire duration of every fight you participate in, and a lot of the time you just can't do anything about it.

Also, Riot's balancing team doesn't actually attempt to balance anything it seems. Part of their business model seems to be releasing champions/VU's with insane power that are clearly going to be overpowered and then waiting for their sales to taper off before nerfing them.

If I was trying to solo queue rank or anything I would have gone mad. Thankfully for me, I can just watch Lyzol and Milldawg go mad instead.

The longest hard CC in LoL is Ashe's ultimate at 3 seconds, while other hard CC have an average duration of 1-2 seconds. Dota 2 goes up to 4 seconds, with some even higher like Overgrowth at 4.5 seconds, Chronosphere and Cyclone at 6 seconds, or Sleep at 7 seconds.